I apologize for the delay in posting. I just got back from my step-son's destination wedding in Costa Rica at a remote waterfall resort that had no internet access. I'll try to catch up on posts this week. First, I wanted to talk about whether a company should go into 'stealth mode' or go for the buzz. There are clearly times when each is required in the life of a company. If you're trying to raise money or generate sales quickly, you need as much buzz as possible. On the other hand, premature buzz can bring you too much attention. That attention could prove distracting to you and your staff, but worse, it could alert your competitors to the fact that you've become a threat. Worse still, if your product isn't quite ready or isn't truly perfect, you can bring in unnecessary scrutiny and your competitors may pounce on your products' inadequacies. So, though there are certainly exceptions, my recommendation would be that unless you need outside investment immediately, remain stealthy until your product is solid, you have a proven marketing plan, and you're ready for the big launch. Even then, make sure you know what you're up against with the buzz. It can kill you faster than a bullet to the heart.I suggest this after having made a few huge mistakes in my career. One of the biggest was heartbreaking for me. My team and I had developed a truly disruptive networking technology. We were true believers in a technolgy that had potential to change the world. We had signed contracts with one of the largest telcos in the world as well as with DARPA. Both had deployed and proven its value. We partnered with some of the biggest players in the industry and thinking these partnerships now made us invulnerable, went to the press. Within weeks, we were listed in Inc's top 50 companies and in Red Herring's top 10 companies to watch. All of the major industry press were singing our praises. And then the BIG Guy came after us. Soon, the BIG Guy was showing up at our customers telling them that they refused to support our technology and that they would withdraw support of their products if the customer continued to deploy ours. Our partners were dumbfounded and we really didn't know what to do. We had hoped that our partners would back us up, but they wanted to leave it to us rather than cross the BIG Guy. We talked to our VCs who suggested that we sell the company to a player who could give us wide enough distribution to force the BIG Guy to follow suit. We did that, thinking once again that nothing could stop us.Two months after the deal closed, the CTO from the BIG Guy invited me and the CEO of our new parent company in for a chat. I gave a presentation of the technology and showed how easy it would be to propagate in their products. The CTO congratulated me for the world-changing technology, slapped me on the back and said we'd be doing business. I was on top of the world. Our technology was going to bring incredible advancement to the entire networking world and Internet. As you might guess, it didn't happen. No one will ever know exactly why our technology was killed off. I offered to buy the company back from our new parent company but they refused. Several years later, after stalling the market with a red herring to ensure that no one else picked up where we left off, the BIG Guy created an initiative for a similar technology based on their own products. Today, almost 20 years later, it is widely deployed as a core underlying technology in most major networks. The moral of the is story is to be stealthy as long as you can. And when you emerge from stealth mode, make sure you know who you're up against. Have a solid plan to address hostile competition. Sometimes big friends are not enough.

You've hired the best of the best. Per our previous post, these folks are as smart and confident as you are. Their egos are strong enough that they can take criticism without flinching. They're so good, you may be wondering if they even need you.Now, how do you motivate them, get them to work as a team, and manage them? If these are the people you think they are, if they're as good as you believe them to be, then your job is to set the direction and get the hell out of their way so they can do their jobs. Your own job is as facilitator, not boss. You want to make their lives as easy as possible so that they can be productive as possible. When I left my engineering group at IBM and moved to the field (regional sales office), I thought my job was to evangelize the technologies that I'd developed, to help the sales force and customers understand it. I believed that would be the entirety of my job. I was the guru and they would come to me.My boss was a rising star in IBM. On my first day, she sat me down and explained what was expected of me. I quickly discovered that there was more to the job than I thought and that I had a lot to learn. I also found that while others on the team respected my technical expertise, they understood that I was a complete beginner when it came to dealing with customers in sales and support environments. My 'boss' had explained to them what my weaknesses were so that they could back fill for me and guide me until I learned the ropes. The other important thing my 'boss' said to me was that she wasn't my 'boss'. She had a different job than I did, but that we were all part of a team. Her job was not more important than mine and mine wasn't more important than anyone else's. From a work point of view, we were all equals. We had to work together to truly succeed. While I was a bit skeptical of this 'no-boss' idea, it turned out to be true. She was a facilitator. There were times where someone screwed up (often me), and in a post-mortem, we would figure out what went wrong and how to be better in the future. Often we did team analyses of any failure. And perhaps most fun was when we had a huge success, and we analyzed that too, learning from successes as well as failures. I used this approach in my subsequent companies and was able to keep a talented team together for many years (in some cases, decades). Most moved with me from startup to startup. In one iteration, I did what my CFO called my grand social experiment. Based on the concept that no job was more important than another and that we were all taking equal risk, I gave everyone, including myself, equal ownership in the company. They gave me proxies for their shares so I could run the company, but when we succeeded, they shared equally. I don't necessarily recommend this approach unless you've determined that indeed, all of you are taking equal risk. If you like the basic concept, I suggest weighting the ownership based not just on contribution, but on the amount of risk taken as well. So let's see if we can summarize the lessons I learned, put to practice, then refined in my companies:

Lay out the mission. As CEO, you are the visionary.

Make sure that each member of the team understands her/his role and what's expected.

Make sure that everyone understands your job and what you're going to be doing both on a macro scale and on a day-to-day basis. Micromanagement should not be part of your job description.

TRUST that your people are there to do the best jobs that they can do. Make their lives easier. If they need to work an unusual schedule, trust them to get their jobs done during the hours they do work. Understand that if they have the flexibility to take care of the demands of their non-work lives when they need to, they'll be much more productive when they do work (which will likely be more often).

Keep in mind your team does need to see each other from time to time, so some common hours are necessary.

Verify that (4) is working. Help your team make adjustments and course corrections if necessary.

Repeat 1-5 regularly.

One thing to watch out for: I had several employees who would work themselves to death if I let them. Yes, they had flexible schedules, but with our ability to always be connected, we can overdo it. I found that some of them would work themselves into a state of exhaustion and their productivity would then fall. In these cases, discovered in step (5) above, I would FORCE (encourage strongly) them to take time off to clear their heads. Then I'd work with them to help them create a more balanced work schedule and I'd verify. Much of this is TRUST. But assuming you've done your job in selecting the best people, with your guidance and regular verification, you should be able to trust your team members to help you build the best company possible. For an interesting and amusing video on trust (I must admit that this is cats versus dogs), see Dogs and Cats teaching Trust.